Late at work again - the chief reason I've not been blogging much recently is because I've been at work late consistently for about three weeks now and in the last month I've worked most weekends. Now I left facilities for precisely this reason! Anyhow - while prepping some cables for a job tomorrow I notice this image on my webcam from home and wished I was there - three boys, a sax and a PC!

Axentra Servers are the business - they are a range of embedded Linux fileservers that are aimed at the net appliance end of the market - small companies (less than fifty users) and power home users. We put one in at a client's place and for five hundred quid you get a box that does NAT routing, firewall (based on SmoothWall - the industry leader for Linux firewalls), webserver (Apache) mail (including the best webmail front-end ever!) as well as the more mundane file and print-sharing and PHP/SQL database functionality. Having been using it for a week now I'm convinved that for 90% of users it outperforms Win 2003 server in all respects and is a lot easier to set-up and maintain - and what about the initial outlay, per-user licenses, trained technician, and security concerns you get with Windows?. It has mirrored 200gig internal drives and because (internally) it is based on the ext3 filesystem you can hang external USB/Firewire drives and they immediately become part of the shared storage pool - fantastic! It handles backup (on and off site) and is a joy to use. See these screenshots for an idea - the interface looks lovely.

Shepherd's Pie! - Chris in tech support had been going on about this commercial for ages - it is very funny and I've re-formatted it for my 'phone.